Race-based antiracism reifies into essentialism once historical openings close

Evidence

Racial invocation by the state and definition of the state by race, it follows, almost invariably restricts the range of critical intervention and transformative potential to a dualistic and mutually exclusionary choice. On one hand, it elevates the narrowing naturalization of the assimilationist or integrationist; on the other, it begrudgingly spawns the separatist (in the Black Nationalist contrast to the segregationist). Ranging between the promisingly reactive and a reactionary politics, race-based antiracism may be pragmatically necessary in some historical moments, but it clearly reifies under the weight of its own logic into racial essentializing once those historical openings close down. It is for just this reason that both Angela Davis and Philomena Essed strongly urge political mobilization around common political interests rather than pre-existing or prefashioned common identities. Here, the common identity is to emerge out of the mobilization rather than essentialistically (and so exclusionistically) giving rise to it (Davis, 1998:319-20; Essed, 1996:109-10). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1705

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the tension between identity politics and class-based solidarity familiar from wider social theory literature. — connects to: Early antiracism’s black-white focus was reductive and essentialist, obscuring multiple racisms. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”